Randomized gift exchanges and other multi-party, social gift exchanges such as “secret Santa” and “yankee swap” gift exchanges are popular in cultures around the world. In certain versions of a randomized gift exchange, each participant is partnered with another participant who will give them a gift, i.e., a donor, and someone they will give a gift to, i.e., a donee. Participants usually do not know who has been assigned to give them a gift. Part of the game is that each participant is both a surprise giver and a surprised receiver. An important part of randomized gift exchanges is the secrecy and element of surprise when the recipient receives a gift, from a sometimes unknown gift giver. In some gift exchange rituals, the gift giver always remains unknown.
The current state of the art for randomized gift exchanges is very basic. Commonly, people rely on simple, even rudimentary ways of matching participants with a gift exchange partner randomly. Typically, one person, the event organizer, manages the entire process with often laborious involvement, including creating slips of paper with participant names written on them and manually drawing matches “from a hat” and so on.
In recent years, a few online randomized gift exchange sites have been developed, typically offering a simple computer system that matches participants in a gift exchange. In general, these sites serve a very small user base, and do not offer social gifting, social wishing and communication features, or other features that help event organizers manage and coordinate complex situations such as large randomized exchanges, workplace exchanges, exchanges within communities (online, special interest groups, etc.) in which participants may not know one another, wedding and baby showers, and so on.
Moreover, these simple systems do not have features that address complexities common to many randomized gift exchanges and other online large group coordination tasks—such as unanticipated, late-in-the-game changes to the participant mix. If an invited guest RSVPs after the draw, if someone new is invited after the draw, if someone drops out of the event after the draw—if any change to the participant group occurs after the names are matched and drawn—these systems cannot manage such flux. The present invention solves this problem.
To look at the related art for another aspect of the field of the invention, some online group games, such as online “fantasy” sports games (e.g., Fantasy Football, Fantasy Hockey, etc.) are evolving in sophistication and many still have common issues that can be solved with the present invention. Fantasy sports games involve multiple participants, a draw related to the order in which participants can choose players for their fantasy team, other complicated rules related to the draft, and a group of participants matched to privileges that become complicated and invalid when there are changes after the initial draw. The current state of the art of these games ranges widely from the most basic—manual, non-computerized, involving cards and much coordination on the part of an organizer—to sophisticated online systems. But many of these more sophisticated systems still struggle with how to manage changes to the group of participants after the initial draw.